Are there any rock hounds out there? I was walking along and found this quartz-like rock with weird shades of yellow and green. Does anyone know what it is? Do we have any collectors reading this blog? If you recognize this crystal, please leave a comment below.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the coloring may be due to algae growing on the rock, but I am not sure. If it is algae, it is pretty pervasive throughout the entire crystalline structure.

In the past few weeks, I have been phoning Europe a lot lately from North America. Until very recently, Skype wasn't very practical. I had to use a regular land line telephone.

We have used many brands, and as far as I am concerned "Euro Shades" is the best phone card out there. It is one of the best in terms of rates where $5 lets you talk for two and a half hours which is just over 3 cents a minute.

In many other cards, the lines are bad. They are filled with background noise, or have echoes on the line. On others the calls are frequently dropped, or sometimes just do not get through.

"Euro Shades" usually has excellent phone line quality and calls are rarely dropped. This card is on my "Recommend" list.

If I had to point out a negative aspect of "Euro Shades", it is that when I call and no one answers at the other end, I am still charged for calling. I lose about three to ten minutes of talk time every time that I call and no one is at the other end in Europe to pick it up. This happens too, when I am calling and the other party is one a cell phone and temporarily out of cell service. I get charged on this end.

However the positive aspects outweigh the negative aspects and I recommend this card wholeheartedly.

I walk the train tracks for exercise. They are mostly level and one can walk for miles. As I step between the ties, you would be surprised at the bits and pieces of train that I see. I have found many of the huge lock washers pictured above. The quarter below is to provide scale. I have found them in rusted states, in a pristine state and everything in between.

I often wonder if these parts are important, what part of the train do they fall off, and do they pose a danger to the public.

Obviously a lock washer was made to hold a nut tight. If the lockwasher has come off on the tracks, then the train has lost a nut somewhere.

I also find huge machine bolts that have come off the train, and other bits of unidentified pieces and parts of a train. If I let myself ruminate about it too long, it could get scary. After all, a normal car, truck or transport trailer doesn't shed bits on the road. Why should a train?

I also find a lot of discarded rail spikes as well, but that is a different story. They are not train parts.

This amazing catch was made during a game between the Fresno Grizzlies Triple A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants and Tacoma Rainiers Triple A affiliate of the Seattle Mariners. The ball went foul and the ball girl makes a truly amazing catch. Must See!

I can't believe that folks still think that Lady Gaga's bones or nubbins on her face are real. Some speculate that they are implants. I have seen horn implants on the forehead, and they are gross. Others claim they are plastic surgery body modifications. They came out in time with the release of her album "Born This Way".Lady Gaga herself denied that she had plastic surgery. If you blow up the photo, you can see for yourself that the horns, bones, nubbins -- whatever, are just stick-ons.

Take a look:

You can see the edges of the squares lifting, even though they are covered in makeup.

Since I have a Michael Jackson autopsy picture on this blog, a reader sent me this to consider. The reader has been wondering if Michael Jackson was gay. In his research, the reader came across a gay blog where the gay blogger was discussing some of the possible origins of homosexuality.

One of the theories, is the amount of testosterone that a fetus gets in the womb when the mother is pregnant. A proven biological indicator of testosterone received as a fetus, is the length of the index finger compared to the length of the ring finger.

Most men, and those who received healthy doses of testosterone as fetuses, have a ring finger that is longer than the index finger. Many many gay men have the opposite, as shown in the picture below where the index finger is longer than the ring finger.

The reader then went and found this picture of Michael Jackson showing a longer index finger than a ring finger.

Our reader is careful to say that this doesn't prove that Michael Jackson was gay, however it is a sign that many gay men have. You decide for your yourself.

My name is Mrs. Aisha Hussein from Kuwait. I am in the hospital and i want you to help me distribute my money to the poor and needy. please reply if you can assit. Allah Hafiz.

Am I the only one that notices that his name is Allah Half-ass?

I have a business proposal for you.Should you be interested, please

respond to my letter immediately, so we can commence all arrangements and

I will give you !more information on the project

REGARD.

DR ALEXANDER DANKUDI

EMAIL = alexdan112@aim.com

They all have vermin about them. This one is Dan - Cootie.

I have a proposition and I will appreciate your utmost confidentiality in this matter until the task is accomplished. I am Norman Chan, Tak-lam, S.B.S, J.P, Chief Executive, Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA). I have a Business worth $47.1M USD for you to handle with me. I need you to assist me in executing this Project from Hong Kong to your country. After hearing from you, I shall provide you with detailed information regarding this Business.

Regards.

normanchan188@aim.com

What blows me away is if they have all of this money, why do they need me? They could buy some bum off the street to cash it in.

Dear Friend,

My Name is Mr. Kamal Tan. I am a Banker by profession with experience of over 17 years now.However, my reason for contacting you is purely on secret business deal, to transfer an abandoned $18.5 (Eighteen Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollars) to your foreign account.This money has been unclaimed since 13 years in our Bank. The owner of this fund is a foreigner, who died since August, 1997 with his Next Of Kin. If you are interested kindly get back to me with my private email kamaltankamal@hotmail.com and with your full informations below for more details

YOUR NAME :

YOUR RESIDENCE ADDRESS :

GENDER :

OCCUPATION AND PHONE NUMBER :

I will be waiting for your kind response.

Best regards

Kamal Tan

This guy wants to tan my hide. And finally Microsoft loves me:

Dear lucky winner,

This is to inform you that your email has won a consultation prize of the Microsoft Corporation EMAIL DRAW held 2011 your email won you (£1,000,000.00) (One Million Great British Pounds

To claim your prize,please contact your fiduciary agent Mr. James Peterson with your Batch#:409978E and Reference No:FL/668530092 and contact him via email immediately within 24hrs with the information below.

Contact Person: Mr. James Peterson

Microsoft Promotion Award Team Head

Winning Claims Dept.

Email: msnclaimsdpt@gmail.com

================================================================

CERTIFICATE OF PRIZE CLAIM(Receipt Official Notification Letter)

===============================================================

1. Full Name.......................

2. Marital Status:...............

3. Occupation :..............

4. Age:..............

5. Sex:................

6. Nationality:...........

7. Tel:..............

8. You Home Address...............

Our special thanks and gratitude to Bill Gates and his associates.

We wish you the best of luck. Thank you for being part of our promotional

When you go to the page, there is a link where you can offer your opinion on how to break this to the code-breakers.

This code has stumped them for ten years. My bet is that it is not a cipher or coded English, but rather it is shorthand for bookie transactions or something like that. (If you are thinking of submitting this as a tip, I already have).

I looked up a glossary of bookie terms, and it seems that one can make references to BET and TOTE -- all bookie terms.

My travels are very very interesting, and I have met some people who have access to the ultra rich. I have just found out that there is a super secret FaceBook for the ultra rich. It is only natural that there would be something like this, but I have never run across it before. It makes a lot of sense that there should be one.

Apparently you have to be vetted and invited to join, and there is a hefty initiation fee to join. There are poorer people joining who are the peons like secretaries and personal assistants, but they are sponsored by the rich and they can be traced. They are not allowed to have full profiles, just contact pages so that "my people can talk to your people".

I am told that this secret URL begins with an "X", and there is no login page. If you stumble upon the web page there is nothing on there. However there is a USB key that goes with it, and if the key detects the page, it securely logs you in.

I just discovered a huge SEO tip, trick and secret. SEO is search engine optimization, and it means tuning your web content so that search engines find it easier, rank your page higher and drive more traffic to your website. Traffic is the key, because I have monetized all of my websites with Google Adsense and the more traffic I get, the more money I make. It is that simple. So traffic is king, and the key is SEO. If the search engines can't find you, you are living in the backwaters and boondocks of the internet where nobody goes. However in my case, it is more like the ghetto of the internet.

So what's the trick? Recent I put up a new blog -- one of many. It usually takes a couple of weeks before Google finds it -- even though I register the blog with Google. And after that, it takes a few months before I have enough content that the search engines regularly find it.

I was therefore surprised to find that I was getting hits just after two weeks. The source was the unlikeliness source that I would have thought of. I put a picture up with every blog entry. If I don't have a pic, I make a graphic with GIMP (a free graphics tool) or Photoshop (which I bought). That is the key -- the graphic or photo.

I then tag the blog or web entry. I put the usual tags that pertain to the content. But on a whim, I started adding tags that pertain to the photo. And that is where I started getting my hits.

My hits started coming from a classified ads site. Beside the ads, they had a brand new Google widget that shows pictures of the key words of the ad. In my case, a florist was selling pink carnations for mothers day, and I had a photo of a pink carnation in a garden. People would come to read the ad and then they would click on my photo. In other words, someone else would attract the traffic, and re-direct it to me courtesy of the Google Image Widget, a nice photograph, and properly constructed tags pertaining to the photo.

How do you determine proper tags? Let's suppose that I have the photo of the palm tree (above). Obviously the first tag is "palm tree". What are some other tags? Google will help you with that, because it knows the most popular search term. Like the photo above, you find the tags by what Google suggests are the most popular search terms. Click on the picture above and see what tags I chose for the web entry.

And there is one more thing to consider. When naming your picture or graphic, do not use image007 or the camera number like 1000C3458. Instead give it a name that is the same as the most popular Google search term. That way, when the key word is used anywhere else, and the site has the Google picture widget, your website will be presented to them as well. Instant free traffic for you, just by taking a bit of care with the pictures on your blog or website.

And if you want to know how to create the perfect ad for your website, don't forget to get my e-Book called "Top Secrets of The Google Ad Masters" -- click HERE!

I have been given a golden opportunity to test my new rugby video and performance analysis software on an Aviva Premiership professional rugby team.

This endeavour is akin to Sabremetrics in North American professional baseball where one uses data-mining and intense statistical analysis to discover scientific, objective knowledge about the game that was previously unknown.

For example, in baseball a Seattle-based team with a limited budget of $40 million had to compete with a team like the New York Yankees who could afford marquee players with a salary budget of $125 million. It was found that conventional wisdom about assembling a team of good players was neither conventional, nor wisdom.

In the old convention, all of the scouts looked for a young pitcher with a blistering fastball and a high strikeout count. Through data analysis, it was found that not only was a pitcher with a high ground out ratio more valuable, but he was also cheaper on the open market.

This intensive analysis has been done with baseball, football and basketball. No one has yet done it with rugby. Rugby is a very dynamic game and stats abound, but they are all conventional stats that really do not measure what a player does minute by minute and apply that to the greater context of the play. Some software packages give you a minute by minute report, but it is meaningless unless you take it in the context of inputs, outputs and results, both on a micro and macro level. There is tons of minute-by-minute data, but very little pattern knowledge of what that data means.

I developed the piece of video analysis and annotation software that models and digitizes the entire game second by second. It is all put into a database in a proprietary format that allows extensive data-mining and statistical analysis of every second of every game.

There are a few software packages that give you a real wow-factor re-simulation of the game, and a whole pile of individual statistics about every facet of the game, but these are not very helpful in real life. What is helpful is garnering new knowledge -- objective knowledge about the sport and about your team. The way that it is done, is by taking statistics, facts, data and factors, and integrating that data into knowledge by making inferences, testing those inferences and endless cutting and re-dimensioning of data until statistically significant knowledge about the team and the game pops out. Nobody is doing this out there, and I will be the first. Like Sabremetrics, this will add objective knowledge about the sport of rugby on the macro level.

The most important aspect of this, is that the tool can isolate and chart characteristic on-field behaviour of the opposition, thus allowing the planning of a defense for a formidable opponent. Teams that are well coached consist of human beings with ingrained play patterns, and it is a valuable tactical advantage for an opposing team to know this. If you know the attack vector that is coming, you can plan for it. But it is not enough to know the attack vector, you have to know the probabilities and how it will play out, and how it changes with different parameters.

I am hoping to develop a model using Bayesian Predictive Analytics that will predict and spot the future Dan Carter superstars of rugby while they are pimply-faced teenagers.

This is a quantum leap forward compared to something like Opta stats, which dissects every game into component parts but just posts flat statistics that do not show why these events that they have dissected happen the way they do. RugbyMetrics is taking rugby performance analysis to the next level.

I got to say that I was highly disappointed by the Memorex DVD-R product. It was junk. A lot of my problems went away when I went to the Verbatim product pictured above.

I still remember the days when Memorex was king, and there product was audio tape that reproduced sound so faithfully, that glasses shattered. That was 20 years ago. There ads were in every major magazine including National Geographic, Scientific American and the top tier of most periodicals. Today they turn out junk when it comes to digital media.

With the Verbatim, I didn't get write errors. I got a clear, fast DVD burn with minimum muss or fuss.

I did not nor expect to receive any type of compensation for providing this review. This was based solely on my experience.